If someone includes a link in an email to you (or a blogger), they usually want something from you.

People don’t like feeling used, rightfully, and will often delete any emails with a link in them if they have any suspicion at all.

The solution? Be different: If most marketers are sending their emails with links like that, do the opposite: don’t include any links in your first email.

The one reason you might be hesitant is that now you need to get a response first before you can even ask for a link.

Trust me, though, if you have something worth linking to, you’re going to get a reply.

Additionally, if someone won’t even reply to an email, do you think they’re going to go through the trouble of giving you a link? Rarely.

If you test this, you’ll find that your reply and overall link rate goes up significantly.

How do you actually do this?

It’s simple. If your normal outreach emails include a line like:

I just published a great guide on washing cats, here’s the link: (link)

Replace it with something like:

I know that you’re always writing about cats, and I did a little research on washing cats properly (I actually found a lesser-known technique that’s amazing).

Would you mind if I sent you a link to it and got your thoughts on it?

One big thing is that this forces you to frame it in terms of the benefits to the person you’re emailing.

And since your emails aren’t automatically being thrown in the trash, you’ll get a lot of responses that say “sure, send it over.”

That doesn’t guarantee a link, but if your content is great, you’ll get a very good conversion rate.

One final note is that you don’t even have to mention your content in the first email as long as you open a dialogue. Building a long-term relationship should be your goal here, not just getting one link.

Way #2 – Make it shorter

I told you about the marketers who basically copy templates.

Now I want to talk about the marketers who despise that and do everything they can to go the extra mile. You might be one of them.

I love this type of marketer, but they make a few common mistakes.

One is that they make their emails way too long.

If you’re emailing someone who gets hundreds of emails a day, they do not have time to spend 10 minutes reading a 2,000-word email. After all that work, your email will end up in the trash.

If you’re trying to cram in personal stories in order to “make a connection,” stop.

Instead, include only the most important point. If it’s really interesting, you’ll get a reply with an invitation to expand on it.

A good email should be under 200 words long. You’re looking for 4-6 sentences in most cases.

Way #3 – Stop asking for too much work

If someone comes up to you on the street and asks you to take a picture of them, most of the time you’ll probably agree to.

But if they asked you to do a full photoshoot for them for an hour, of course you’d never say yes.

The point here is that the more you ask for, the less likely you are to get it.

At some point in your conversation, you’ll have to ask for a link. But there are many different ways to do that.

Unfortunately, many link requests go like this:

Here’s the link to my content: (link).

I’d really appreciate it if you linked to it from anywhere on your site.

Do you see why this is really bad?

It’s asking for a lot of work.

First, the blogger needs to look at your content. There’s no way around that.

Next, they need to look up their old posts and find one that’s relevant to your topic.

Then, they need to find an appropriate space for your link in that post.

Make it easy: You can instantly make your conversion rate go up by making it easier to link to you.

Here are a few ways you can do that:

Provide a specific page on the blogger’s website, where a link to your content fits really well. Write any text that is needed so that their content still makes sense.

If you’re promoting an infographic, offer to send them an embed code.

Give them future post ideas that they can use (make them great) that would naturally include a link to your content.

Offer to edit and improve an old post they wrote if they’ll allow you to include a link. Send them the finished HTML code so that they can just copy and paste it into the post.

These are just a few ways. If you think of any other ways to make their lives easier, do it.

Way #4 – Targeting is crucial for conversion rates

There’s one easy way to ensure that your conversion rate is 0%…

Send emails to the wrong people.

If you wrote about cat washing but tried to get links from home improvement bloggers, you’d, of course, get no links. But that’s obvious.

Most marketers make subtle mistakes with their targeting.

For example, common advice is to find bloggers to contact using tools such as BuzzSumo.

It’s not bad advice, but you need to keep your targeting in mind.

Let’s say you wrote a guide on social media marketing.

If you just type in “marketing,” you’ll get SEO bloggers, paid advertising bloggers, sales bloggers, and many more that aren’t social media marketing bloggers.

If you sent emails to 500 of these, you’d definitely get some responses and links.

However, most of them will simply delete your email because it’s clear that you don’t even know what they write about.

There are some exceptions where you might want to ask for a link from a blogger from a non-directly related niche, but you’ll need to be very clear explaining your reasoning to them.

If you want high conversion rates, you need a highly targeted list of people who can actually link to you.

Filter out the irrelevant contacts in your list—it’ll save you time and won’t make an impact on the number of links you get.

Conclusion

Unless you already have a site with tons of traffic, you’ll need to conduct ongoing link building campaigns.

Quite obviously, the better your conversion rate, the more traffic you’ll get as a result and the less time you’ll need to spend on your campaigns.

That’s why I shared these four ways of boosting your link building conversion rates.

If you implement all of them, it’s possible to achieve a conversion rate that is double or triple what the average marketer gets. That’s a huge difference in the short and long term.

I’d love to hear whether you’ve put any of these tactics into action and how they’ve worked for you. If you’ve had any problems, leave me a comment about those too, and I’ll try to point you in the right direction.